‘Hannibal’ Recap: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) is a good and loyal patient in more ways than one. So when his psychiatrist, Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson), tells him he shouldn’t be friends with Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) anymore, he follows through. Unfortunately for Will, though, losing Lecter as a friend means a lot worse things than unreturned phone calls or being unfriended on Facebook.

Poor Will’s fever might have subsided, but he still hasn’t gotten the straight diagnosis from Lecter yet, and he continues to suffer hallucinations and lost time. On top of that, his boss, Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), doesn’t even know if he can trust his star investigator anymore. The death of diseased killer Georgia Madchen (Ellen Muth), with whom Will identified and sympathized because her mind was warped by reasons beyond her control, finally drives the profiler over the edge, leading him to make bold and bizarre connections between this death, the gruesome murder of Lecter’s colleague Dr. Sutcliffe, and the murders of the Minnesota Shrike copycat’s victims. It puzzles Jack and his crew enough to investigate, though.

At first, Georgia’s death is considered a suicide since she didn’t want to remember what she did, and, besides, she was facing murder charges in the death of her friend and Sutcliffe. As the episode begins, we see her in an oxygen chamber as she convalesces and speaks to Will. Not long after, though, Georgia and the chamber are engulfed in flames as she sparks some static in her hair with a comb. She was supposed to be wearing a grounding bracelet to prevent static buildup, but she wasn’t wearing it at the time of her death, prompting the suicide suspicions. However, Will claims she wasn’t suicidal and asserts that she was murdered by the same person who killed Sutcliffe, whom Georgia encountered without seeing his face. (She told Will she dreamt it was him, only she couldn’t know for sure since there was no face.) Of course, we know it’s Lecter, but Will says he’s thinking clearly now, and is prepared to find the killer.

Of course, Will’s wild new theory renews Crawford’s suspicion that Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl) is the copycat, as well as the killer of Nicholas Boyle, Sutcliffe and Georgia. He has his crew look into Garrett Jacob Hobbs’ movements during the Shrike killings, and they find that he traveled with a companion. Who else could it be but Abigail, acting as bait to lure victims for her dad? So, then, why is Will protecting her? Crawford, in turn, challenges Lecter on this point, demanding to know if Lecter has been holding back any important information about Will. By this point, though, Lecter is no longer interested in being Will’s buddy. Du Maurier has urged him to cease the friendship, since he and Will are “disconnected from the concept,” and, more nefariously, he sees an opportunity for Will to take the rap for everything.

Earlier on, Will had confided in Lecter that he was close to figuring it all out, that he was pretty sure the copycat was someone with deep knowledge of the case. Sensing his chance, Lecter applied some suggestive pressure of his own, perhaps sowing self-doubt in Will’s already guilt-ridden mind by responding: “Someone like you.” Now, with Jack in his office, and Will off to Minnesota to recreate all the crimes with Abigail in tow, Lecter plays a little dumb (for him), acting as though his friendship with Will had blinded him and as if Jack’s growing suspicions started to make sense. He admits to Jack that Will’s been losing time, that sometimes he doesn’t know where he is or what he’s done. “There are days when Will doesn’t even understand his own thinking,” Lecter tells Jack. He even plays him a recording of Will admitting to feeling guilty over the death of one of the copycat victim’s deaths.

In Minnesota, we witness one of the most unsettling and masterful sequences of the season: Will and Abigail return to the Hobbs hunting cabin, and the two of them, both irrevocably haunted by guilt and the specter of the Shrike, begin trading accusations. Will figures out that Abigail was indeed bait for her father, and that Jack was right about her. Abigail fires back with her own suspicions about Will’s murderous bent. It comes to the point where they suspect each other of being the copycat killer. Only, the sequence is heavy with hallucinatory dread and disorienting editing, and we’re never sure that what we’re seeing is real or imagined by Will. He snaps back to reality on an airplane, where the sequence began. Was it all a dream? No, because it’s not the same plane. Will is back at Dulles Airport, but Abigail is nowhere to be found.

She stayed behind in Minnesota because Will was frightening her, but she’s not alone. She returns to her house to find Lecter waiting for her. The meeting begins with a hug but soon descends into doom. ”He knows everything,” Abigail says about Will. “So does Jack Crawford,” the doctor responds. Abigail is troubled by the notion that people will start to suspect Will of being the copycat, but Lecter’s wishy-washy response makes it all click for her: She’s talking to the copycat right now. With dawning terror, she asks Lecter why he would call and warn her father that Will and the Feds were coming. “I was curious what would happen,” he responds, with an eerie, amoral innocence reminiscent of the android David in last year’s “Prometheus.”

“Are you going to kill me?” she asks her onetime protector as he moves in with ominous tenderness. “I’m so sorry, Abigail,” he says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you in this life.” We don’t see what happens, but we can figure it out. And now all the pieces are in place for the lonely and nearly friendless Will, already doubting his own sanity and conscious of his ability to kill, to become the prime suspect.

Next week is the season finale, so which threads do you think will be tied up? Is Will doomed to be hunted? Will someone crack Lecter’s game?

Some other notes:

- Du Maurier and Lecter’s bond goes beyond a merely fascinating professional relationship. We learn that Lecter fended off Du Maurier’s attacker (a patient referred by Lecter, no less, so I wonder if there were more to the attack), who died by swallowing his own tongue.

- That should remind fans of the death of “Multiple” Miggs in “The Silence of the Lambs,” in which Lecter is imprisoned in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Miggs, who resides in the next cell over from Lecter, insults FBI trainee Clarice Starling with some rather disgusting gestures, but he ends up paying for his rudeness as Lecter talks him into killing himself by swallowing his own tongue.
- Will’s nightmare about Georgia is reminiscent of Japanese horror films (such as “Ju On: The Grudge”) featuring ghosts who move around in creepy, herky jerky movements.

- Great shot: Closeup on Lecter in his office after speaking with Will, framed so that we see his stag statue in the background. The stag, of course, is the symbol Will keeps dreaming about when he’s dwelling on the Shrike’s copycat.

- In the opening of the episode, Lecter brings a recovering Will some soup made with silkie chicken, which is known for having dark blue flesh.

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